


To the Arms That Are Waiting Only For You

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2775737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Coda. Sort of. Deeply weird. A hole in the world and the road beyond.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To the Arms That Are Waiting Only For You

The world tips sideways. Rights itself. Spins in other directions.

 _There are other worlds than these._ She read it in a book once – which book, when, how, why, none of that matters. Nothing else has remained with her so clearly nothing else is important. The words become a refrain that her mind sings to her, over and over, when she’s dreaming with the road passing beneath her, when she settles her head between his shoulderblades and wraps her arms around his waist and knows he’ll never let her fall.

 _There are other worlds than these._ She sees them pass in procession like the markers of the miles. She sees cities rise and fall, she sees flames, the staggering of the dead and the open mass grave the world has become. She sees open deserts and plains and the craters of bombs, gouges in the face of the world. She dreams war horses and battlefields. She closes her eyes and listens to the thud of his heart and she thinks of beating wings.

Dreams of them. In each one he lifts her, carries her in his arms. She’s felt hot lead and hot tears and she’s kissed his mouth and tasted her own blood.

The wind carries it all away.

 _There are other worlds than these._ In this world they have always been on the road and the road never ends. When she doesn’t dream, when things slide back into focus, she lifts her arms and throws her head back and it’s not a bike and he’s not a man and the wings aren’t leather and stitching.

He carries her in his arms and they fly.

~

She can believe impossible things. Both later and before he tells her that this is why he loves her, why he has always loved her, why he loved her before she was born, before he was, through all the worlds there ever were and ever will be.

~

When they stop for the night he makes fires. She watches him. Speech eludes her. She knows his name but it doesn’t come. Her head hurts and the refrain beats through it like his heart. He looks at her, says things, takes her face in his gentle hands. She can’t remember what she can’t remember. She shakes her head and he looks sad.

She doesn’t want him to look sad but the first time she saw him he was crying.

There was blood, she thinks. There was blood, blood, all over everything. Blood and burning like her head was made of fire. When she closes her eyes it’s not exhilaration. It’s against the pain. The dark is so much brighter than it should be. He gives her food, helps her eat; when it’s too much and she starts to shake with everything that’s slipped away from her he folds her into his arms and holds onto her, strokes her hair so carefully, whispers to her that _it’s alright, everything is alright, everything is gonna be fine._

There are other worlds than these and in this one she’s alive, even though she’s on fire. Made of flame. She lifts her hands to the last of the coals and watches them burning through her fingers. Laughs. Once they burned down the whole world and she was laughing then too.

 _Go to sleep,_ he says, and she looks at him, up at the stars. She’s in pieces, shining, scattered across the dark. She’s waiting to be born.

~

They ride. The world is flattening, all golden, all grass. The wind is cold and the air smells like snow but no snow falls and the sun stays bright. She knows that if she stared directly at it, she wouldn’t go blind. She can drink moonlight and not go blind, she knows that too. She’s made of light. All her veins are light, a network of sparks. Sometimes when he touches her they shoot through her body and she holds her breath in her throat like a clenched fist.

She thinks they might be running from something. But she isn’t afraid.

He is. Maybe. Sometimes when they stop for the night and he leans on the bike, strikes a flame between his fingers, lights a cigarette and looks at her over its glowing end, she thinks she sees a kind of fear there.

Maybe not of whatever is behind them. Maybe he’s afraid of something inside himself. Maybe he’s afraid of her.

~

Her name. She knows it; it’s one of the things that holds consistent across these other worlds. Her name and his, her face and his, his hands and the blood and the fire, the sunlight off the point of a bolt, the brilliance of its fletching. The gleam of her knife. Heartbeats and wings. She gathers these things to herself like talismans, cradles them in her hands.

She would show them to him, if he could see them, as proof that everything is all right. Because when he says it to her, soothes her as the pain ebbs and flows, she isn’t sure he really believes it.

_The signs are all there._

She paid close attention. She was a good student. She knows how to read them.

~

 _Two things we ain’t got no control over,_ he says. She thinks he says. Or he said it once and she’s remembering. Or he will say it, soon. She’s been knocked subtly out of sync with everything and sometimes it takes some effort to untangle it all.

_Two things we ain’t got no control over. Bein’ born and dyin’._

Except she isn’t so sure about that last part.

And actually, what with all the other worlds there are, she isn’t sure about the first one either.

~

Mountains in the distance, peaks sharp when they should bleed into the sky. She looks over his shoulder, fascinated. The world is more focused than it was. Two days ago – she does know days when they happen now – they stopped in a town half burned and all dead. Found gas, a little canned food, hardly anything and he expressed dissatisfaction but she thinks it’s enough. It’s all enough. She has a kind of unshakable optimism which she finds interesting.

Once he suggested they stop moving but that must have been another world because this world is all movement. All running, riding, flying, and the roar of the bike is a song.

She watches the mountains approach and she thinks they might be running from one of those other worlds. A bad one. One in which things didn’t go right. The pain in her head flares when that thought occurs to her so she puts it away, focuses on the peaks as the bike rises into the foothills, the oncoming snow, the trees, his heat against her, the crunch of ice under her boots, the creak of the cabin’s door, the fire and the light and the blood when he brings her meat – these are her talismans as well, her amulets of _now_ strung around her wrist.

That other world won’t find them.

~

 _We’re gonna run into trouble with the roads,_ he says, looking at her in the thin dawn light. Close to her. The night was cold, so cold that she crept close to him, lay beside him, against him, and he didn’t push her away. Now she opens her eyes and he’s there, staring at her.

He looks stunned, a little. Like her, trying to focus.

 _What about the roads?_ She sits up, the blankets wrapped around her. She understands, though. The snow. It’s already thick on the ground and she knows they have higher to climb. She’s beginning to get a sense of not only what’s behind but what’s ahead. They’re not just running _away,_ they’re running _toward._

 _We’re gonna get blocked. Stuck if we ain’t careful._ He rubs his hands together and looks away. She can’t read his face at all. _Stupid. I shouldn’t’ve brought us up. We coulda found somewhere down there, holed up for a few months. Tried again in the spring or somethin’._

He looks at her again, from beneath the fringe of his hair. He’s looked at her like that before. Not just in this world. Across all the worlds, this might be something else that holds constant. _We can stop runnin’. I been draggin’ you all over. I’m sorry._

She shakes her head and untangles herself, goes to him on her knees, reaches up and combs her fingers through his hair. He leans forward, his forehead against hers, and the pain is gone. All gone. He always makes it go. He’s born, fully. He’s more _here_ than she is. He’s pulling her through.

She loves him for that.

 _We have to keep runnin’._ She kisses his forehead, his cheek, his mouth. Slowly. He tenses, freezes, but doesn’t pull away. Somehow she thinks he wasn’t expecting this. _You know why._ Suddenly a great many things are clearer. _I dunno how you did it, but it shouldn’t have happened that way. If we stop it all falls apart._

This dream he’s spun for her. This world he made with his own hands, with the wind and the song of the road. Like sharks, if they swim they’ll live.

 _The roads won’t be a problem._ She kisses him again. She never did this – she remembers that now. In the world from which they’re running, she never did. _They won’t be a problem because I say._

She has power. She has power here because he’s given it to her, because this is all for her. All for her, for always.

 _Okay,_ he murmurs, and covers her hands with his, and his voice is choked with tears. _Okay._

So maybe in the end it’s her carrying him.

~

He loves her for her faith. She loves him for his will.

Her light. His beating heart. Together they’re the core of the sun, its corona. Its storms.

Its fire.

~

They rise through the mountains. She lifts a hand and there is no snow, not where they need to be. He laughs and that’s its own song. This world is magic, she thinks with her arms thrown around him, his neck. This world is magic, and so was that one, and so are they all, _but in this one the magic belongs to us._ It’s beautiful and terrible, old magic from old worlds, but she won’t fear it because she no longer fears anything.

Maybe she didn’t open up the roads at all. Maybe they were already open.

Maybe he didn’t make this world at all. Maybe it was already here.

~

So she dreams.

Not of other worlds. Not of this one. The one behind. The hallway closes in on her like hands set to strangle, and she feels the cold heat of knowing her own death was seconds away. None of it is right. None of it. She doesn’t feel the pain, but she feels what it is to be pierced, violated that way, fallen where he couldn’t catch her. She feels his tears on her face, how he was shaking all over when he lifted her up. Carried her. Exhausted, wrenched – she feels it as if she’s inside him. She curls herself against his back but he can’t feel her. Faces, all around her, twisted, agony, the collapsing of deep things. Earthquakes. All that pain, and nothing she could do.

But him.

He held her, and something cracked open inside him. Something small, desperate, beyond grief and rage. Something stronger than the walls between things. Something with all the force of a bullet.

His heart fired it like a gun and tore the world open. He carried her through.

~

She wakes up gasping, crying, beating her fists at the dark. She knows everything now. She’s being born, being pushed through herself, and it’s pain beyond everything she’s ever known. It’s pain beyond dying.

She remembers dying. She doesn’t remember ever being born.

He holds onto her, doesn’t flinch when she rains blows on his chest, his arms. He’s always been strong, even when he didn’t know, even when he denied it. He is, when he needs to be. He is, for her. She cries against him and he holds her, and the dark around them is so complete.

If this had been the end, she thinks, calm beneath the torrent of sobbing, he would have followed her there. One way or another he would have been with her. He would have left everything else behind.

He did. That’s what she’s weeping for. Herself. The others. Him. Because there was no running from loss. There never is. He avoided nothing. All he did was shift things around.

The universe is self-correcting. Across all worlds, that holds true.

She presses her face into the hollow of his throat and he whispers to her. _I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

_Beth, I’m so sorry._

~

Her name. He says it over and over. She says his. She whispers it to the wind as they leave the mountains, leave the snow. The world gets warm again and the light inside her glows a little brighter.

She’s not thinking about running anymore. It’s not about running. It’s about where they’re going, where they’ll be. Now, when she closes her eyes and makes wings of her arms, she thinks about a wide, glittering expanse. The end of the world.

This holds true across all of them.

There is always an end.

~

There is a road, at last. There are many roads, as many roads as there are worlds, and many ways to travel them. But at the end of them all, there is one road. It has no name. It needs no name. No one ever has to search for it. It can’t be found by searching. It can’t be avoided. Everyone rides it in the end.

~

Through trees taller than any she’s ever seen. She looks up, keeps looking up, looks until her neck hurts. There were great trees in Georgia, old trees – there was a tree at the farm that she climbed when she was seven, fell, broke her wrist, and she always believed that tree was a tree from the Garden of Eden. The beginning of the world. Because of course the world began with the farm, and of course it would be beautiful enough to be an echo of a Paradise lost.

Silly little girls are sometimes not so silly at all.

She might have asked him to stop. But her breath is coming quicker now, her pulse racing. His heart, too; she can hear it, feel it against her cheek. Everything is bleeding into speed, everything urging them along. The trees are a blur – beautiful red and green, dappled sunlight and deep shadow. Yet all at once they break through into rolling, golden hills and a gentle afternoon, a freshening salt breeze. They fall and fall into a valley, and they pass a little white church, so perfect and so pristine that she’s sure someone still tends it. Perhaps every house through which they pass is still cared for. They bring that with them, that care, that love; they bear it in their hands like a gift.

She laughs. She thinks he might laugh with her.

 _There are other worlds than these_. So no end has to be an end.

It’s coming. Everything in her chest is hot and tight, expanding, threatening to crack her ribs. She lays a hand on her chest, a hand on his back, imagines their hearts running together through her veins. The thin white scar on her wrist – it might beam like a ray of sun through a cloud.

He loves her because she might believe anything. She loves him because he believes in her.

~

The road opens to meet them like welcoming arms.

She can’t breathe. It’s a ribbon of sunlight, cutting down through grassy bluffs and coursing along a stretch of rocky beach. Clouds move in the distance, slow and ponderous, like the mountains they left behind. But here before them is all sun, scatters of sun, beams of it, brilliant to the point of blinding. Sun flowing, crashing in and out on the shore, beating all the rocks smooth as polished black bone.

She holds onto him and he carries her to it.

She stands on the shore, raises her arms like wings. He stands behind her, not touching her, and she doesn’t need to look at him to know there are tears, and he’s not weeping for her now.

This road is a wave and it overflows, washes clean.

 _I’ve never seen this,_ she says when she turns to him. He’s close. Looking at her. He looked at her that way once before, and it told her everything she needed to know. _Never saw it in my life._

 _Me neither._ Words feel inadequate. They aren’t saying anything the other doesn’t know. They aren’t playing that game anymore.

She laughs, tosses her hair back over her shoulder, and when she goes to him she kisses the tracks of his tears until they’re gone. _Cut that out._

He doesn’t. She doesn’t. She doesn’t want him to. The end of the world – really, they can do whatever they want now. Nothing is chasing them. Nothing will find them. That world is not this one, and whatever comes next will be something else as well.

 _There are other worlds than these_. Not her words. But true ones. So in this one she frames his face with her hands, tugs him against her, seals her mouth over his. All around them the water is a song, and he holds her and kisses her, and she’ll sing to him. Every sound so far, everything after this – laughter and tears and the wind and the road and the thunder of their hearts in time – all of it will make a symphony that goes on and on, until it reaches the sign that signals return. Repeat.

They don’t have to keep running.

They’ll never stop.

**Author's Note:**

> An audio version of this can be found [here.](https://soundcloud.com/user1510691/to-the-arms-that-are-waiting-only-for-you)
> 
> Title from Glen Hansard's ["Come Away to the Water",](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uq-awEc_-Y) which has become a bit of a Beth song for me lately.
> 
> The soundtrack for the writing of this was ["Immunity"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XUnzZuhdnw) by Jon Hopkins (and King Creosote), from his album Asleep Versions.
> 
> The road at the end is [a real road](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4140/4795419074_6cd959e2f5_b.jpg) \- it's called Mattole Road, and it's one of the entrances to the beaches of California's Lost Coast region. [The hills are real hills,](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4080/4794784817_97abc1a288_b.jpg) and [the church is a real church.](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4077/4795415848_81312dd362_b.jpg) If you ever have a chance to go there I really, really recommend that you do. 
> 
> Those pictures were taken by my husband on our honeymoon. Please don't steal them. 
> 
> "There are other worlds than these" is a phrase from Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and I've taken to yelling it when things with fictional people don't go the way I'd like. Try it, it helps. Sometimes.
> 
> For those who are like "wtf did I just read" I offer one possible answer in the comments below. But the truth is that there's no "right" way to interpret this thing. Do whatever you want with it.


End file.
